RTE and the National Lottery could not make the set of Winning Streak accessible for a disabled participant to play the various games. Derek Mooney did the things that she couldn’t do. Equal Status Act how are you!
That is my abiding memory of Saturday night telly – after I got over the shock of seeing a disabled person on the television that is – not talking about their disability. Pity they had to buy a scratch card to do so. In fact it is not the first time I have seen someone with a disability on Winning Streak – maybe that’s how all disabled people are supposed to get on television if they are not starring in People in Need.
But did they win?
Money and a car they couldn’t drive…
Oh God, the irony.
The unpalatable truth is that RTE were probably fully compliant with the Equal Status Acts, which set the bar pretty low. The Acts require service providers to provide ‘reasonable accommodations’ at ‘nominal cost’. Anything which requires more than nominal cost is not required under these Acts. A barrister advised me that the legal interpretation of ‘nominal’ is ‘no cost’!
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Act was updated to match the UK legislation which requires service providers to do anything which is not a ‘disproportionate burden’.
I wonder if RTE met the requirements of S.26 of the Disability Act 2005 which requires them to provide services to people with disabilities in a mainstream manner?
I’ve recently had cause to be looking over legislation in the area and it seems that the Incitement to Hatred Act doesn’t explicitly cover disability oddly enough. Perhaps the view of the Oireachtas at the time was simply that no one would stoop so low and that the court public opinion would take of it were it to occur, but it seems that some journalists have learned nothing from the Mary Ellen Synon case. Still it strikes me as strange.
One should also remember Dan that if Incitement to Hatred Act did cover disability – disabled people would have to be affected by whatever the incident is. The conjugation of a verb or adjective is not that – as someone who has about 18 years experience of writing, and advocating on behalf of discriminated groups (never mind actually being one!), I have quickly learnt when someone is offensive and when they aren’t. Mary Ellen Synon definitely was and not just to disabled people. Your canoe that you are paddling has a rather large hole in it.
Conjugating verbs, modifying adjectives and casting about with nouns is all about language and the Act was intended to cover language and actions. I was just noting that it struck me as strange that disability wasn’t included in the Act when it was drafted but there may have been problems with defining the scope at the time. I think it is in the hands of the state to take the case not an affected individual, I’m open to correction on that.
Fact is Mary Ellen Synon made it her stock in trade to be offensive and thankfully wasn’t able to get off the hook with some defense about journalist privilege or that she was wonderfully kind to the world outside of her column. The latter which might be viewed as the totality argument or the Charlie Haughey defense as some might term it which consists of saying ‘sure didn’t X do great things for the country/group Y and what does it matter if they did some other thing that is illegal/wrong/offensive’ is not one that stands up to any real scrutiny. But it comes out a lot in Irish life for reasons that escape me.
Taking the point “I have quickly learnt when someone is offensive and when they aren’t.” I think the key aspect was that it was what MES said, or rather wrote, that was being responded to initially and it was her trenchant defense of it (indeed to the point of disowning the apology that the Sindo put together) that drew people to make judgments about her as a person. When all people had to go on is the text then what other reasonable approach was there for them to take? She had friends or colleagues who may have know a different person than that which came out through the writing and who sought to come to her defense (Myers leapt in there for a while if I recall) but at the end of the day all that people had available to learn from was what she wrote. I’m sure you learnt that that she was offensive based on what she wrote, and why shouldn’t you have taken that view?